7 CSS Tools You Should be Using

7 CSS TOOLS YOU SHOULD BE USING

CSS tools are very popular among graphic designers and web designers. They are useful as they assist in controlling and formatting structured content and layout of documents. Additionally, the tools play a significant role in enhancing both the look of the design and the layout of your website. Many tools have been introduced recently because the website loading speed has greatly been attributed to the CSS tools and the CSS generators. For a while, most designers felt that the CSS tools that were available were not compatible with all the browsers. New and enhanced developments tools were later introduced to solve this issue, and this enables downloads to be faster.

Effective CSS Tools

Some of the most effective tools you can use include;

CSS menu maker

CSS Menu Maker is great for peoples looking for a comfortable working platform that can make jquery, HTML and CSS menus for mobile sites and also for PC. It offers a glamorous web app that can essentially browse so many different types of navigation menus. In addition, it has boundless, responsive solutions that enable you to basically make the most out of the web menu and also its controls. The site usually offers plugins for Dream Weaver and WordPress that will cost you some money. They also have online editors that you pay for to access code. However, you can browse through the menu for free.

ScoutApp

This is probably the most popular tool out of all the tools and web apps out there created for developers. Most people argue that it is quite simple and web developers prefer to use it, especially when jumping into the dynamic CSS whirlpool. Another good thing about this tool is the fact that it comes with automatic and manual project setup, Linux, OSX and cross-platform compatibility with windows. The web app allows you to process .scss files and .sass files into required CSS effortlessly.

Compass

This tool is not only developer and user-friendly but also has excellent and quick performance. It is a CSS tool that is used across the globe and is trusted by the users. Actually, it is the most trusted and powerful framework that is used by many frontend Sass developers. Compass is easy to use especially if you want to create vertical rhythms, extensions, eye catchy typographic, sprites or CSS3. Compass developers have positioned it as a design framework that uses Saa syntax.

Bourbon

If you are looking to make your digital life easier, this is one of the tools you can use. It is a very convenient instrument for most developers. Bourbon can easily be integrated into your work to give you immense help. It is a very simple and lightweight SCSS framework. Many web developers use Bournbon.

CSS Beautifier

CSS beautifier is one of the most helpful tools a developer can have. Web designers sometimes usually just strive to have more attractive tools to work with. Unlike the other tools, CCS beautifier only modifies your CSS so that it conforms to better standards that are easier to be read by people. CSS beautifier is not a cleanup service or optimization service. The beautifier is used after optimization services and minification to basically restore your formats and also make code way easier to parse.

CSS Shrink

Web owners strive always to have fast loading speed that will primarily improve the user’s experience. They also aim for a fast loading speed for other benefits like SEO optimization and retaining visitors on their page. In this regards, the tool CSS Shrink comes in handy immensely.

It is a useful online tool that ideally helps reduce the size of the CSS to the smallest possible size. This later translates into improvements in page load time. It does this by removing all the unnecessary stuff. Unnecessary stuff could be comments, spaces, newlines, and tables. This is done through the minification process. Minify automates the task by combining and also caching your JavaScripts and CSS files and not only by compressing.

You need to install Minify on your Web Server if you want to use it as it is written in PHP 5. You can then have the ability to load your web-based interface and also identify the JavaScript files and CSS that you want to combine and minify. After you have done that, you are given a URL link that you can use to replace the disparate calls to different JavaScript files and CSS.

Before minifying though, you need you to know that minifying the source code makes it hard to read. This process should, therefore, be done after development. You should also ensure that you have non-minified CSS source code that will be used for maintenance and future development.

Rapid CSS Editor

This is a great tool that makes creating and editing modern sites based on CSS easier. Developers have the option of the CSS code being written by the style sheet editor or writing the CSS code themselves. This tool’s main work is to help simplify all your tasks and also to save on time.

Conclusion

Using the above 7 CSS tools will help you significantly to create a well optimized and cross-platform CSS which is readable and also compact. Most web designers will attest to the fact that, in CSS, how elegant your solutions will be is what will measure your skills. The progress witnessed in web development has led to improvement in workflow and has also created more responsive web designs.

Although the numbers of web development tools have been increasing significantly over the years, trying to identify the best software for you can still be daunting. As a designer, you are also looking to minimize the effort and the time you put into design pages. You can entirely rely on a CSS framework to help you create layouts that are very well organized. There are also other utilities that you can utilize to help you with the same. Regardless of whether you are a talented designer or not, using CSS tools will help you streamline your process and achieve a lot in web design.

Author Bio

Tom Koh is widely recognised as a leading SEO consultant in Asia who has worked to transform the online visibility of the leading organisations such as SingTel, Capitaland, Maybank, P&G, WWF, etc. Recently he was instrumental in consulting for a New York-based US$30B fund in an US$4Bn acquisition. Tom is a Computational Science graduate of the National University of Singapore. In his free time he performs pro-bono community work and traveling. Google+